Does Google PageRank really matter?

Around January 20^th 2011, internet bloggers and website owners found that Google had updated its PageRank system.

For some it was excitement while for others it was anger.  The last time Google carried out a full PR update was back in April 2010 with some small quarterly updates reported. For a while the rumour mill has been in full swing on forums, blogs and Twitter saying Google were going to get rid of the PageRank altogether, bringing anger to many bloggers who rely on free organic traffic from Google and believe that the Google PageRank somehow helps bring  traffic to their website. However, these rumours were put to rest when the Google toolbar was updated. Many businesses and bloggers noticed their PageRank was jumping up bringing on a sense of happy days, whilst many in the world of SEO would argue that PageRank isn’t that important. The truth is PageRank isn’t really a sign of quality or even good SEO as many websites perform very well with little or no PageRank. PageRank is merely an indicator that Google actually trusts your site as it is giving it a higher level of importance, which is largely down to the age of your domain and number of backlinks. If your PageRank is shifting down the scale towards zero then it could be due to a number of factors, most notably that or you are losing some of your backlinks. Simply carrying out regular link building from a range of good quality and relevant sites will most likely bring your PageRank back up again. For us the recent PageRank change has been good news as our main Opace website went up one position from 3 to 4 and our web design and SEO website jumped up two places, from 0 to 2 We would be interested to hear you thoughts on whether or not SEO and Google PageRank really matters?